Recent developments in telecommunications have resulted in networks for a wide variety of services. From conventional voice or data networks to wireless packet and enhanced paging networks, the variety of telecommunications options available to individuals and business is staggering. This variety of options has lead to a revolution in how people live and work and mobile and/or nomadic workers are becoming increasingly common.
While the available telecommunications services have been adopted to various degrees, to a large extent these services, and the networks that support them, remain separate from each other reducing the overall potential of these services. For example, it may not be possible to send email from a personal computer client in an office to a pager client used by a salesman, even though both are connected to respective telecommunications networks.
This lack of integration and/or communication between networks and clients is a recognized problem and a variety of "middleware" products have been proposed and/or produced to transfer data between one network/system and another network/system. For example, Chapter 5 of the publication, "Understanding the Next Phase of Mobile Commuting", 1997, by the Yankee Group is entitled, "Evolving Middleware Solutions for Wireless Remote Access" and discusses middleware solutions for communications with mobile users via wireless communications.
While middleware can be configured to provide the desired interconnectivity for many specific situations, to date no general solution exists to interconnect various telecommunications networks. Further, no solution exists to provide a distributed network to supply a variety of desired services at multiple sites in an essentially transparent and convenient. manner for users and service providers. Thus, the long sought goal of communication from any client or service to any other client between any two locations is still largely an unachieved goal.